I am having a problem with Cinnamon Mint 18.3 and Samba. I am newish to Linux and Mint but I have a background of 15 years consultancy services setting up and maintaining Novell and Windows networks plus 5 years of being a lecturer in networking at an FE college. On retirement my home setup consisted of a Netware 6.5 server, 2 Windows 2008 servers and a Windows XP workstation. Not liking Microsoft's move to subscription-based software I decided I ought to investigate Linux and bought two machines to experiment. I installed Cinnamon Mint 16 on the new machines and found I was quite happy with the setup although even now I cannot get my head round the system of scattering setup and reporting routines across several files and directories.

Anyway I successfully set up Samba to access my Windows machines and again when I upgraded to Mint 17.1. By then I had moved most of my needs to my main Mint workstation and the other machine held the backups. I bought two more machines to use as test machines for the latest version of Mint to see if I was missing anything important. Then a few days ago we had a power cut here and my backup machine got totally screwed; well I could not resue it anyway. Not a problem, I thought. I'll install again from scratch; I have other copies of the backups so I can restore those too.

Having read the latest messages about Spectre etc it seemed sensible to upgrade to Mint 18.3 and I thought this is a good opportunity to move to a totally Mint only setup so now I only needed 2 Mint machines to talk to each other. I was a bit surprised to discover that Mint seems not to have a built-in connectivity for networking machines and that I still have to use Samba which I had previously thought was only necessary if Windows machines were involved. I would be delighted to be proved wrong but my web-trawling results seem to suggest that Samba is preferred. Even then it is not installed by default. Have I got this wrong? How can a supposedly grown-up operating system not have built-in networking?

So I install Samba server on my new-install 18.3 backup machine but find I am completely unable to get my 17.1 main machine to connect to it. I want to get my stuff backed up before I upgrade the main machine to 18.3. I use the same command line string that worked with 17.1:
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.101.124 ~mount -o username=<name>,password=<pwd>
but get Mount error(13): Permission denied
and if I do
smbclient -L //192.168.101.124
I get session setup failed: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE

Some web results suggest there might be a problem with Mint 18.3 and Samba. Is this true? Am I doing it all wrong? Can someone please point me in the right direction.

I'm going to go with the most obvious question first in the hopes that this is something simple:

So I install Samba server on my new-install 18.3 backup machine but find I am completely unable to get my 17.1 main machine to connect to it. I want to get my stuff backed up before I upgrade the main machine to 18.3. I use the same command line string that worked with 17.1:
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.101.124 ~mount -o username=<name>,password=<pwd>
but get Mount error(13): Permission denied
and if I do
smbclient -L //192.168.101.124
I get session setup failed: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE

Did you on the Mint 18.3 server add <name> to the samba password database: